[Kevin Leonard]

I used to have the same opinion of some teams in this thread about ramps. I felt that they were a lazy way to make a robot that never considered how to actually get game pieces into a good robot.

However a few things changed my mind:

1.) Ramps can help allow teams with less resources to compete with the best of them.
An example I found awesome was 2550 from at the Pacific Northwest District Championship. Watching their robot, which had a Kitbot drivebase and a basic elevator, seed second and consistently place 2-3 stacks using their ramp was awesome to me. They understood the strengths and weaknesses of the robot they built and used that knowledge to compete at the highest levels.

2.) They can be enable the best to do even better.
Teams 1114, 254, and 2056 use long ramps to bypass the bottleneck that is the chute door (which is a cool engineering feat in its own right). By using these ramps, these teams are able to put up staggeringly high scores and blow my mind in what I thought was possible from robots this year.

3.) Using a ramp is a trade-off.
To begin with, if your robot is tethered to a ramp, you have to start autonomous in the area of the field with the staging zones, preventing you from effectively competing in the Autonomous can race. Tethers can also provide other issues, like stacks being on top of tethers, and thus not fully supported by the scoring platform, and tethers being caught in wheels.

Overall, I really like what this year's rules have allowed for in terms of robot design. Ramps and tethers and can grabbers and conveyors are what makes this game much cooler than I expected.